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A Novel
by Linn Ullmann
Called a "masterpiece" (Ali Smith), this stunning novel explores desire and anxiety, beauty and youth, memory and power.
Paris, a winter's night in 1983. The girl is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begins to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before. Set in Oslo, New York, and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a bravura quest through layers of oblivion that probes the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret. A delineation of time and place over the course of a life, this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward sixteen-year-old girl lost in Paris. Girl, 1983 is a raw, stark, and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.
"In precise, lyrical prose, Ullmann creates a captivating portrait of a woman in search of herself, caught in a spiral of fear and loneliness. An engrossing, intimate narrative." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[An] intense meditation on trauma and art...The solemn tone never wavers, which some readers may find stultifying, but the narrator's vivid memories of her youth—colors, impressions, lacerating remarks—culminate in an unflinching description of the fateful encounter with the photographer. The result is a mesmerizing act of recollection and reconstitution." —Publishers Weekly
"This book, about how we meet and understand the powers and the powerful vulnerabilities that form and have formed us, is written with extraordinary courage and a spirit that astounds. It's a work of real strength: poetic, witty, vital, cool and fevered both at once. Girl, 1983 does more than hold the self at all its ages. It pushes the fused power of memoir and story to a new dimension. I think it's a masterpiece." —Ali Smith
"Linn Ullman's writing, already distinct for its rare moral clarity, attains a new authority in Girl, 1983. It is the authority of focus, of a grip on life that grows more tenacious as its scope determinedly narrows. In the manner of Annie Ernaux, Ullman uses the act of attention as a weapon against indifference. It is as though by reconstructing the disorder of certain realities, she is able to confer sanity on them. Yet there is also a brightness and generosity to her work that seems to turn its themes—the powerlessness of youth and femininity, the intermingling of memory and shame—inside out." —Rachel Cusk
This information about Girl, 1983 was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Linn Ullmann's novels have been translated into more than thirty languages. Girl, 1983 topped the bestseller lists in Scandinavia and was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, as was its predecessor, Unquiet. Ullmann lives in Oslo, Norway.
The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant
by Liza Tully
A great detective's young assistant yearns for glory, but first they have learn to get along in this delightful feel good mystery.
The Original
by Nell Stevens
In a grand English country house in 1899, an aspiring art forger must unravel whether the man claiming to be her long-lost cousin is an impostor.
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by Molly Beer
A women-centric view of revolution through the life of Angelica Schuyler Church, Alexander Hamilton's influential sister-in-law.
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Rikki Thunder, drummer for '80s metal band Whyte Python, is on the verge of fame, love—and a spy mission he didn’t expect.
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These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas
"[An] atmospheric tale of unexpected hope." —Lisa Wingate, New York Times bestselling author
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